: The nation’s eviction crisis could make voting more difficult for some Americans

Officially, all 50 states plus the District of Columbia allow homeless people to register to vote. Over the years, a range of court decisions across the country has ensured the right to vote for people without housing. And in cases where a state does require citizens to provide an address to register, homeless individuals could instead provide the address of a shelter or even the cross-streets where someone typically sleeps to do so.

“Every state allows homeless people to vote,” said Brian Miller, executive director of Nonprofit Vote, a nonprofit organization that works to encourage voting. “Some states even have a box where you can draw where you live rather than write an address.”

But people who don’t have a home face myriad practical challenges in getting their registration squared away and then being able to vote on Election Day. “When you become homeless, the chances of you losing your documents increase exponentially,” said Kat Calvin, founder and executive director of Spread the Vote, a voter mobilization organization based in Los Angeles.

Without a safe place to store things, paperwork such as birth certificates can go missing or get destroyed. And without those documents, registering to vote can be close to impossible.

Plus, 36 states require voters to present some form of ID to be able to vote. Homeless people may not have the necessary form of ID, Calvin said. Finding a way to access the internet to learn about the requirements to register is another challenge.

Then there are the psychological barriers and stresses that homeless people often face, which may cause voting in an election to take a backseat. “It’s very traumatic to be homeless, so you may not be prioritizing voting,” said Giselle Routhier, policy director at the Coalition for the Homeless in New York. “You may be more worried about where you’re going to get you next meal.”

But now with the COVID-19 pandemic, a new host of challenges for thousands of voters has cropped up, homeless and voting-rights advocates said. “Some voters will be disenfranchised this election year when they lose access to their old mailing addresses,” said Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

Evicted Americans may need to re-register — but many states have already closed registration

Tens of thousands of Americans have been kicked out of their homes during the coronavirus pandemic, in spite of the host of national, state and local eviction moratoriums that have been in effect.

The Eviction Lab at Princeton University tracks eviction filings for 24 cities across the country. Since the pandemic reached the U.S. in mid-March, landlords have filed for nearly 93,000 evictions across those cities, according to the organization’s data. This includes evictions in cities located in hotly-contested states including Houston (more than 13,700 filings), Phoenix (more than 13,670 filings) and Tampa, Fla. (nearly 5,000 filings).

Other data suggests that many landlords may have ramped up their efforts to file for eviction against tenants who are behind on their rent in recent weeks. The Private Equity Stakeholder Project has recorded some 11,500 eviction filings by private-equity firms and other corporate landlords since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced a nationwide eviction moratorium at the beginning of September. Over 4,000 of these filings have occurred in the month of October since the CDC issued clarifying guidance regarding the moratorium.

Research has documented the relationship between evictions and homelessness. A 2017 study in New York City found that eviction was the second leading cause of homelessness among families with children, with 33% of homeless families citing it as the primary reason. And a 2001 national study reported that roughly two out of five homeless people who rely on homeless assistance programs lost their access to housing through involuntary displacement.

Many of the people who were displaced by COVID-related evictions may need to re-register to vote — and there’s a significant chance they aren’t aware of that fact.

“A lot of these families are experiencing homelessness for the first time in their lives,” Miller said. “If you’re living within the same precinct in most cases you still can vote, but if you move across town you’re supposed to re-register every time you move. And that includes when you’re facing an eviction.”

Only 21 states plus the District of Columbia allow for same-day voter registration. All of these states require a voter to present proof of their identity, and in some of these states voters must bring proof of address as well. In the 29 states that don’t allow residents to register on the spot when they go to vote, the deadline to register may have passed many weeks ago.

The pandemic has complicated efforts to get out the vote

Advocates for the homeless do a lot of work to encourage people without housing to exercise their right to vote. But the pandemic has upended many of the traditional ways organizations encourage voting.

Volunteers at homeless shelters will often do in-person education to help the shelter’s residents learn about how to vote, but shelters have seen their numbers of volunteers dwindle as a result of the pandemic, Calvin said.

Transportation is another area of concern. “People experiencing homelessness frequently don’t have their own transportation,” Calvin said. “Providing rides has become a nightmare because how do we keep everyone COVID-safe?”

And some measures that states have adopted to make voting safer from a public-health perspective provide little help to people without housing. For instance, multiple states have sent mail ballots to registered voters automatically this year.

But someone who is homeless may have used a non-mailing address to register, or an address they don’t readily have access to. “In California they’re mailing ballots to everybody, but they’re not mailing ballots if they don’t have an address,” Calvin said.